multitude of Marxist authors have discussed language. I have already
mentioned the Vietnamese Marxist Tran Duc Thao. But we can add the names
of Henri Lefebvre, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Ferrucio Rossi-Landi, Jean-Joseph
Goux and his numismatics, Robert Lafont and praxematics, Renée Balibar on
educational language and the constitution of the French national language,
Michel Pêcheux, and Bourdieu (assuming we disregard his proclamations of
non-Marxism).^2 Not to mention bits and pieces in the founding fathers: Engels
is the author of a pamphlet on German dialects.^3 Gramsci frequently tackled
linguistic issues in his Prison Notebooks.^4 Lenin is the author of a text on
slogans.^5 And, although Althusser seemingly scarcely interested himself in
linguistic questions (a note in his text on the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’
refers to the errant ways of linguists), I have sought to show elsewhere that
some instruction on the functioning of language can be drawn from his theory
of ideology.^6 To this long and already distinguished list, I shall add Pasolini
and (as I have already suggested) Deleuze and Guattari.
This paradoxical situation has a historical origin. For a spectre haunts
Marxist thinking on language: the spectre of Stalin and his pamphlet Marxism
and Linguistics. This text merits a serious Marxist analysis of the sort that
Dominique Lecourt once devoted to the analogous case of Lysenko.^7 Such a
study, which is not my intention here, would examine the political meaning
of this weighty intervention by the great leader in a scientificdomain that
politicians are not usually interested in, even if they are active agents of the
ideology of communication. (It is difficult to imagine George W. Bush
polemicising directly with Chomsky.) It would take account of the development
of Soviet nationalities policy and the linguistic policy that flowed from it in
the post-war USSR, as well as the struggles for influence of various schools
in the Soviet ideological and educational apparatus. What I am interested in
here is the effects of Stalin’s intervention on the Marxist tradition of thinking
about language generally. They seem to me to have been two-fold. The first
74 • Chapter Four
(^2) See Duc Thao 1973; Lefebvre 1966; Sohn-Rethel 1978; Rossi-Landi 1983; Goux 1973
and 1984; Lafont 1978; Balibar 1974 and Balibar and Laporte 1974; Pêcheux 1982;
Bourdieu 1982. 3
4 See Engels 1991.
5 See Gramsci 1971.
6 See Lenin 1964.
7 See Lecercle 1999b.
See Lecourt 1977.